"The tables were covered -- groaning beneath the slaughtered hecatombs. It was a feast fit for Homer's heroes...Soups of all kinds -- mulligatawney, and vermicelli, and turtle; huge turkeys and huger hams; barons of beef; saddles of mutton; geese, and all manner of tame fowl; legs of pickled pork, and pease pudding -- these were the delicacies that tempted the appetites of Indian epicures. Two or three ultra fashionists, just imported from cold and icy Europe, stared, and turned a little pale as they inhaled the steam arising from the various "savouries" -- swallowed a jelly, and a biscuit, and a glass of wine; but the rest of the party addressed themselves valiantly to the work of devastation. They drank beer in huge tumblers, men and women; they ate of the beef, and the mutton, and the pork, and the turkeys and the fowls, and they closed with real Mussulmauni curries...."

A description of a dinner at a ball in the 1830s exerpted from The East India Sketch-book in The Raj at the Table: A Culinary History of the British in India, by David Burton. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.